When billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos marries Lauren Sanchez in Venice next week, there will be a spectre of lost love at the feast.
Guests Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom – engaged since February 14 2019 – will need all of their social skills to wish their friends well on this joyful occasion.
For it appears that they are quietly navigating a sad break-up, with insiders saying they have been apart for most of the past month trying to recover from the upset.
Reports that they are splitting have been circulating for around a week, fuelled by Perry being spotted without her distinctive flower-shaped engagement ring in Australia, where she is currently on tour.
On stage in Sydney last week she took a chocolate Tim Tam biscuit – an Australian brand – from a fan and said: ‘This song is about a break-up, and this Tim Tam saved me.’
Perry was in the middle of performing her 2008 heartbreak anthem I’m Still Breathing.
You wonder if her mind wanders back to the California Dreams tour of 2012, when her then husband Russell Brand requested a divorce – via text – while she was on the road in Asia. She had ‘run herself ragged’ trying to keep that flame alive despite Brand seemingly having lost interest in her.
Now she seems to be stuck in a replay of that upsetting period.
People magazine says ‘They’re pretty much done’ while the New York Post gossip column Page Six is even more certain, quoting an insider saying: ‘It’s over. They’re just waiting until the tour is done before they split.’ (The tour, which started in April, moves to the US in July and ends in December. Perry currently has the couple’s daughter, Daisy Dove, with her.)
A friend of the pair – who started dating in 2016 – tells me they are struggling to make a go of things, speculating: ‘Unfortunately they are on the rocks.’
Asked if they are definitely over, or if they might try and reconcile, the friend adds: ‘I’m afraid it does not look promising.’
Representatives for Perry, 40, and Bloom, 48, have not responded to requests for comment.
In truth, turbulence is the rule rather than the exception when it comes to the pair, with both parties known for being high-maintenance in their different ways.
Bloom, who shot to fame in the Lord Of The Rings and Pirates Of The Caribbean films, is a Buddhist who spends the first hour of every day chanting.
Pre-Katy, he was enjoying a long period of celibacy for spiritual reasons. In 2017, they split for a year because he was not ready for a relationship, while he has twice quit acting for limited periods, too.
He has another child, Flynn, with supermodel Miranda Kerr, from whom he separated in 2013 after three years of marriage. Perry herself is much-mocked for her open-hearted, spiritually-questing persona. She was raised in poverty in California by parents Keith and Mary, born-again Christians who wouldn’t let her listen to anything other than gospel music. Keith was a Pentecostal pastor.
Throughout her two-year relationship with Russell Brand, she had couples’ therapy, while she and Orlando also had sessions during their engagement.
Perry said of Bloom: ‘He’s very sensitive. Very emotionally evolved. He gets up at 7am and chants for an hour.
‘One of the things that binds us is our desire to be more spiritually evolved, and our desire to investigate that realm.’ Bloom said in a magazine interview in 2023: ‘We’re in two very different pools [for work]. Her pool is not a pool that I necessarily understand, and I think my pool is not a pool that she necessarily understands.
‘Sometimes things are really, really, really challenging. I won’t lie. We definitely battle with our emotions and creativity.’
Perry went further in an interview last year, explaining their year’s break in 2017. ‘We weren’t really in it from day one. He was because he had just done a huge time of celibacy, and he had set intentions. I was fresh out of a relationship, and I was like, I can’t do this any more. I need to swim in a different pond, but I had to do a lot of real work.’
She added: ‘Orlando and I, when we argue, we argue kinda hot and fast and then cool really quickly. It’s like, “La la la la la, I love you. All right, let’s move on.” We are fire, fire, fire, and so [Daisy] sees all of that.
‘He’s a real sage. We both have parts of ourselves. There’s two parts of us: our highest good, and then our carnal, material self. Ego. When the ego is running the show, then it’s like, “Whoa!” But when that’s in check, then we’re both something else.’
At this point, Perry’s ego must be bruised indeed.
Her space ‘flight’ on Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket in April, at the invitation of pal Lauren Sanchez, turned into a PR disaster.
Perry had thought she was striking a feminist blow and believed that bringing a daisy – the actual flower – into space would be an ‘iconic’ moment.
Instead, it launched a million memes and conspiracy theories.
She was also excited about the skintight uniforms designed by Lauren which would, as Perry put it, ‘put the ass into astronaut’.
Yet, combined with the expense and lack of scientific rationale, the whole event appeared as shallow, boastful exhibitionism.
On top of which, Perry’s new album and her tour have been met with a disastrously tepid response. Not long ago, she was a pop juggernaut, with her breakthrough global smash I Kissed A Girl followed by the 2010 album Teenage Dream, which produced five No 1 singles.
But as tastes changed and moved on, she started floundering. Her latest album 143 has failed to turn that initial mega-stardom into a legacy career. Unlike her peers Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, she hasn’t managed to write a second act.
It hasn’t helped that her 2024 comeback single Woman’s World was savaged by the critics. The feminism displayed came across as insincere. The album was panned. One critic said that she felt more stupid every time she listened to it.
A writer for US-based online magazine Slate said: ‘I’m honestly not accustomed to a high-level pop album being this genuinely bad. I don’t think 143 would seem impressive coming from a random upstart, let alone a one-time member of the pop pantheon. It takes a village of highly paid idiots to fail this completely.’
Her Lifetimes tour has likewise been panned, and there are reports of struggles to sell out some venues. When footage started to circulate after the tour started, one social media user compared her moves to ‘my cat when she’s cleaning herself’; another called her a ‘straight up soulless vessel’.
Perry is, then, facing a crossroads professionally as well as personally. Bloom, by contrast, is making a successful comeback, with his well-received new film Deep Cover, a British comedy also starring Sean Bean, just released on Prime Video. He’ll next be seen in Bucking Fastard – a Werner Herzog film based on a true story – as the object of the sexual obsession of twin sisters.
He’ll make it to the Bezos wedding because he’s long been at the heart of the set cultivated by US billionaire Barry Diller, of which Bezos is a part, and he enjoys the yacht life with his super-rich friends. But it seems that poor Katy Perry may no longer be wanted on the voyage.
